BUILD New NAS Build (first!)

[Mark09]

Hi everyone.

I would like to build a new NAS system for my home (max 3 users).

I was thinking about this build:

MOBO: ASUS E45M1-M PRO http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/E45M1M_PRO
CPU (on board): AMD APU E-450
RAM: 8 GB Kingston KHX1600C9D3K2/8GX (picked from the Memory Qualified Vendors list of the mobo)
HDDs: starting with three 3TB Western Digital (green or red)
CASE: a spare miniATX Cooler Master I already have
RAID Config: RAIDZ1

Questions:
PSU: advice? I like fanless PSUs, to lower the noise
FANS: are additional fans needed?
NIC: do you think it's worth to buy an Intel NIC, to use instead of the Realtek included on board?
FUTURE: What should I do if I want to add more drives in the future? Can the new drives be of a different capacity? Can I add just one drive or I have to add another drive for parity?


I read other threads on this forum, where I read about SuperMicro boards (with ECC support), but I can't afford the price. Moreover, I live in Italy, where those board are not easy to find.

Thanks!!!

 

[cyberjock]

NIC: do you think it's worth to buy an Intel NIC, to use instead of the Realtek included on board?
FUTURE: What should I do if I want to add more drives in the future? Can the new drives be of a different capacity? Can I add just one drive or I have to add another drive for parity?

If you get a chance read my presentation(link in my sig) and all of these are answered there.

I read other threads on this forum, where I read about SuperMicro boards (with ECC support), but I can't afford the price. Moreover, I live in Italy, where those board are not easy to find.

Thanks!!!

ECC isn't a necessity. Just like Intel NIC versus Realtek NIC isn't a necessity. There are risks with every decision. As long as you do your homework and make what you consider are the best choices for your situation that's all that can be asked.

Just because I'd never build a system without ECC except as a test machine doesn't mean you have the same high standard. And that's okay. I try not to take risks depending on the cost, and I live in the USA where alot of stuff is freely available to be purchased.

 

[Mark09]

Thanks for your reply. Your presentation was very helpful.

Any other thoughts about the hardware?

Thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

Not a fan of AMD, but that's strictly a personal choice.

I try to stick with ECC now based on how many users have lost data because of non-ECC. I used to think that the ECC requirement was "above and beyond" the standard user's needs, but I've been converted after the failures users have had.

I'd start with more than 8GB of RAM, especially for a zpool of your size. I'd go 16 minimum but I'd get 8GB DIMMs and make sure the motherboard can support 32GB of RAM in case you need it later on down the road for upgrades.

My sig has a link for why RAID5/RAIDZ1 is dead. I don't consider RAIDZ1 to really add any reliability. It's failed MANY people in this forum and if you tried to contract me to build a server and said it had to have RAIDZ1 I would refuse the contract. I don't want to be blamed when you lose your data. It's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when".

I'd never go with a fanless PSU because the more airflow through the case the better. You may find hard drives won't stay below the 40C recommendation without lots of airflow. You need good airflow over the hard drives if you want a long lifespan. ;)

Greens and Reds are good drives. Greens will need you to use wdidle.exe on them, so be sure you are comfortable doing that before going with Greens.

I only build systems with Intel NICS. After the countless hours users have spent with problems from other brands, just spend the money and save yourself ALOT of potential lost hours later.

It's really a "do it right the first time or you'll be sorry" with regards to file servers. It's a fight between performance, reliability, and cost. Choose any 2. And by reliability I don't mean just uptime. I mean it not destroying your data because of some weird hardware failure.

My system is:

32GB of ECC RAM
Supermicro X9SCM-F-O
Xeon E3-1230V2
M1015(necessary if you want more disks than SATA ports on the motherboard)

That has onboard video, inboard dual Intel NICs, up to 32GB of RAM support, and is 35 watts idle with no disks. Hard to beat that, but the $700 price tag is "too much" for many people. If you want to go cheap its your risk vs reward. But if you are later crying when things go really bad and you "gotta have your data back" and you didn't have a backup, don't expect me to cry with you. I'll be telling you "I told ya so". You could save some money by going with 2x8GB sticks for now and upgrade later when/if you need it.

I will say that I expect my hardware to last me at least 5 years, potentially more. If you go with standard consumer/prosumer hardware, you will almost certainly regret that decision within the 5 years and be forced to "upgrade" to newer hardware.

 

[KevinM]

My system is:

32GB of ECC RAM
Supermicro X9SCM-F-O
Xeon E3-1230V2
M1015(necessary if you want more disks than SATA ports on the motherboard)

That is my home system as well, with the exception that with a 6-drive raidz2 array I'm using the onboard SATA ports.

The choice was between this and an N54L + various hacks to support 6 drives and 16 GB RAM. The N54L might have even been stable, but with a Supermicro board you know it's going to work well. The Supermicro is in a completely different class than the HP and worth the extra cash.

 

[Sir.Robin]

You can have cheaper ECC capable system than Intel/Supermicro by going AMD (socket AM3+)/Asus. Check my signature. :)

 

[KevinM]

You can have cheaper ECC capable system than Intel/Supermicro by going AMD (socket AM3+)/Asus. Check my signature.

I spent about $700 US on motherboard + CPU + memory, and I am guessing your hardware was less than half that. However my budget was the price of my wife's loaded Macbook Air, so I got exactly what I wanted.

 

[cyberjock]

You can have cheaper ECC capable system than Intel/Supermicro by going AMD (socket AM3+)/Asus. Check my signature. :)

Since I plan to make extensive use of the jails in 9.1, going Intel was the only way to expect excellent future performance. AMD really has nothing that touches Intel in the high performance realm.

 

[Sir.Robin]

I was just pointing out that AMD is a good alternative if you wan't ECC but does not wan't to pay a premium. Also, my performance is far from beeing CPU bound, even underclocked.

Many Qnap and Synology NAS'es built for SMB/Office usage is even equipped with an Atom CPU!!

 

[cyberjock]

I was just pointing out that AMD is a good alternative if you wan't ECC but does not wan't to pay a premium. Also, my performance is far from beeing CPU bound, even underclocked.

Many Qnap and Synology NAS'es built for SMB/Office usage is even equipped with an Atom CPU!!

Absolutely. Be careful how much you compare Qnap/Synology/Iomega NAS's as those don't have ZFS(so they aren't really an apples-to-apples comparison).

AMD is a very good option for low cost ECC. There's been a lot of people with performance issues with AMDs. There was some discussion in the IRC channel late last night about this. We were wondering if it was related to the low L2 Cache on the CPUs or of the bulldozser modular design just isn't a good fit with FreeBSD. There's been quite a few users with very decent CPUs that should have no problems with FreeNAS that still perform far below what I'd expect. Considering how consistent it is I have to think its something unique to AMDs. My first FreeNAS server was a first gen i3 and I could saturate 2xGb LAN ports simultaneously. It's quite confusing trying to understand how an AMD that should clearly beat that machine hands down has trouble getting 100MB/sec on a single LAN port.

 

[Sir.Robin]

Strange issue. I have no problem saturating my 1Gb connection with mine... and i use 6 old Hitachi drives. CPU usage history is low as well.

 

[Sir.Robin]

I just remembered that i i itially had sucky performance. However that were caused by the disk drives i had at the time (june 2012).
After changing the drives, internal performance per drive went up 10x if i remember correctly.

Thread:
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/notes-on-performance-benchmarks-and-cache.981/

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/new-build-cant-boot-properly-and-database-locked.7346/

Performance initially (RaidZ2 6x Seagate 500GB):

[root@BATNAS] ~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/vol01/tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 2511.947579 secs (42745391 bytes/sec)

[root@BATNAS] ~# dd if=/mnt/vol01/tmp.dat of=/dev/null bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 459.018764 secs (233921118 bytes/sec)

Performance today (RaidZ2 6x Hitatchi 1TB):

[NAS01] /# uptime
5:40PM up 103 days, 6:51, 1 user, load averages: 0.02, 0.06, 0.28

[NAS01] /# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/vol01/tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 444.097353 secs (241780730 bytes/sec)

[NAS01] /# dd if=/mnt/vol01/tmp.dat of=/dev/null bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 334.334639 secs (321157816 bytes/sec)

Still old drives though... Hitachi Ultrastar A7K1000. Also CPU is underclocked to 2GHz.

 

[Mark09]

Thanks for all this replies.

I'll try to search for prices of both systems (mine and cyberjocks one) and let you know!

 

[cyberjock]

It's quite possible that the users that go with AMD are more typically more thrifty than Intel users, so they are more likely to reuse old(read: slower) disks.

 

[Sir.Robin]

That might be. In my case there was something fishy though. Might have been some compatibility issue. Had something similar with an adaptech controller and a couple of wd drives. Badly implemented ahci on the drives.

Gonna test again with cpu at normal speed, but i dont think there will be much of a difference.

:)